The Architecture of Haruki Murakami's Fiction

THE ARCHITECTURE OF HARUKI MURAKAMI’S FICTION

SIOBHAN BATTYE

JANUARY 2014

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1

MARGINALITY Alienated individuals Power Corridors Illegible cities

7 8 9 13 18

SIMULACRA AND SURFACE Space of the simulacrum Hard-Boiled Wonderland Against metanarratives

23

SPACE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS Magic realism The uncanny Dark (dream) realms

33

CONCLUSIONS

47

Bibliography List of Figures

53

i

25 26 28

36 40 43

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INTRODUCTION

This dissertation will examine the extent to which literature offers a means to interrogate situated spatial experience. My focus is the fiction of Haruki Murakami: preoccupied with the interdisciplinary, I look to read what the author has built. The temporary exchange of architectural with literary sensibilities may, this study proposes, be valuable. To what extent does the space of Murakami’s fiction, in which the slippage between different conditions and realms of reality is universal, support an oneiric, fantastical and even critical understanding of our own spatial reality?

When writing, the author sets out a speculative narrative, determining intensities of insight.

A critical position is taken: the writer presents things that might be, have been, or shall be otherwise. Architecture’s textualisation establishes a tension between formal descriptors (doors, passages, windows) on the one hand, and the subjective, erotic qualities of situated space on the other. In Literary Architecture (1979), Ellen Eve Frank suggests a history of fiction’s architectural settings. Authors, she proposes, have consistently ‘employed’ architecture ‘to present the whereness of ideas and thoughts.’1 The ‘immaterial’ art of literature is ‘materialised’ by architectural representation, which Frank suggests, gives spatial extension to ‘the world of thought.’ Citing ‘cathedrals which symbolize character, temples which organize memory, or dwelling houses which are settings for action,’2 literary architecture exists, she concludes, to support narrative structure. The worlds of her chosen authors are characterised by the intense and tightly focussed exploration of one character’s spatial experience. Through linear narratives and panoramic description, rich with architectural or sensorial detail, modernists such as Marcel Proust and Henry James sought to smooth over the rupture created by modernity.

Whether linear or discontinuous, every narrative sequences spaces: ‘all fiction,’ writes Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), ‘is travel fiction.’3 Literature, he proposes, is fundamentally aligned with spatial practice. Murakami’s postmodern narratives, notable in their 1 Ellen Eve Frank, Literary Architecture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 12.

2 Ibid. 5.

3 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University

Press, 1979), 115.

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presentation of parallel worlds and alternative realities, work differently to those of Frank’s selected fiction. With little effort Murakami’s protagonists slip between architecturally detailed ‘realistic’ space and that in which things ‘too strange to believe’ happen. These transitions are commonplace, yet convincing. In his Japan, as with Roland Barthes’, ‘the rational is merely one system among others.’4 Murakami’s erratic narratives demand more than straightforward spatial reasoning alone: this, writes Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), is definitively postmodern: ‘our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages,’ he suggests, ‘are [now] dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time, as in the preceding period of high modernism.’ We now inhabit, Jameson proposes, ‘the synchronic rather than the diachronic.’5 Whilst providing access to the tradition of fictive architecture, Frank’s enthusiastic interpretation does not fully resonate in the context of this dissertation.6 The fiction, its architecture, and our two studies are products of different cultural conditions, and accordingly should be pried with different tools.

Robin Evans reminds us in The Projective Cast (1997) that we shouldn’t assume a ‘certain resemblance [between architecture and literature] gives us leave to treat the two situations as identical.’ Arguments, terminology and conclusions ought not to be, he writes, taken ‘lock, stock, and barrel from literary theory’ and ‘plastered onto architecture.’7 Bearing this in mind, this dissertation seeks, in the manner of J. G. Ballard when ‘faced with an unknown terrain or subject’ to take the role of ‘scientist on safari:’8 experimentally, literary and philosophical concepts are here projected against the architectural. Construction of physical, ‘real world’ architecture, some contend, is ‘enriched’ by a literary approach. While this is true to a certain extent, this is not the aim of this dissertation. Rather, it is literature’s ability to reflect its ‘fellow disciplines’9 that interests me. In The Production of Space (1974) Henri Lefebvre writes that the search for literary space is made problematic by the fact that is ‘everywhere and in every guise,’ ‘enclosed, described, projected, dreamt of, speculated about.’ Which texts, he asks, ‘can be considered special enough to provide a basis for ‘textual’ analysis?’10 Murakami’s, this dissertation proposes, are ‘special’ enough. This is not because his architectural settings are monumental, grand, or even conceptually whole, however. Rather it is the way that his space mirrors (or, perhaps more accurately, distorts) postmodernity’s most mundane spaces that interests me.

Murakami’s narratives are expansive, elliptical and fragmentary, typically taking place in the

4 Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982), 33.

5 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late-Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 16.

6 In her essay Against Interpretation (London: Penguin Books, 1966), Susan Sontag suggests that

authors who provide opportunities for the reader to interpret their work are over cooperative. They are, she writes, bowing down to the readers ‘refusal to leave the work of art alone.’ Kafka’s work, for example, is a victim of ‘mass ravishment’ by religious, social and psychoanalytical interpretation. (p.8) In ‘good films,’ Sontag believes, ‘there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.’ (p.11) In this study, my interpretive sensibilities are perhaps more closely aligned to Sontag’s rather than Frank’s.

7 Robin Evans, The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1995), xxxvi.

8 J. G. Ballard, ‘Introduction’ to Crash (London: Vintage, 1995), 5.

9 Christophe van Garraway, ‘Total Absence of Illusion, Unlimited Commitment,’ OASE, 70 (2006), 12.

10 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 15.

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mundane ‘junkspace’ of late-capitalist, urban Japan.11 As Lefebvre, this dissertation is concerned with ‘the logico-epistimological space, the space of social practice… including products of the imagination such as projects and projections, symbols and utopias.’12 Murakami’s architecture, understood here in terms of both ‘product’ and ‘projection,’ is first catalogued and then held up to a series of diverse and occasionally diverging theories. This study is presented alongside a relatively independent visual essay, or hypertext, intended to resonate with certain qualities of Murakami’s space. The accumulated textual, intertextual, theoretical and visual references presented, go some way, I hope, to support an informed conceptualisation of Murakami’s diverse architectures.

11 ‘Junkspace,’

wrote Rem Koolhaas in his essay of the same name, is ‘flamboyant yet unmemorable, like a screen saver; its refusal to freeze ensures instant amnesia.’ (p.177) It is, he proposes, ‘what remains after modernisation has runs its course, or more accurately, what coagulates while modernisation is in progress, its fallout.’ (p. 175) Rem Koolhass, ‘Junkspace,’ October, Vol. 100, Obsolescence (Spring, 2002).

12 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 11-12.

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(Fig. 1) Tokyo depicted in a still from Enter the Void, dir. Gaspar NoĂŠ, 2009

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And everywhere, infinite options, infinite possibilities. An infinity, and at the same time, zero. We try to scoop it all up in our hands, and what we get is a handful of zero. That’s the city.13

The postmodern individual, of whom Murakami’s protagonists are exemplary, both produces space and is produced by space. Their position as part of the digitised and surveilled city has been theorised by many postmodernist critics, whose texts, I propose, set up a critical framework from which to reflect on Murakami’s architecture, as occupied. As projection of the narrator, literary space is physical, psychological and social in its construction. This in turn, enables a certain (psycho)analysis of the individual within: it is with such an analysis that I begin this study.

In The Practice of Everyday Life de Certeau sought to mark a significant turning point within the field of cultural studies. By focussing on the modes of private rather than public behaviour, his study ‘shifts focus’ from the ‘heroic’ to the ‘anonymous’ citizen. Processes of mass marketing, technology and politics, de Certeau argues, have forcefully pervaded everyday life, resulting in the marginalisation of the once ‘quantified hero.’ Drawing on anthropological, sociological and fictional references amongst others, de Certeau identifies a series of ‘tactics’ that form the bulk of his text. Such ‘strategies,’ he argues, have been developed by the ‘weak’ to establish individuality within systems administered by society’s ‘strong.’ By privileging the ‘audience’ rather than the ‘actors,’ he writes, the increasing alienation of the postmodern individual can be resisted. De Certeau observes that socialised systems of control, particularly of an observational and technological nature, are at once proliferating and increasingly unintelligible. Paradoxically, he proposes, it is through their fragmentation that such ‘silent technologies’ become universal, constituting technocracy. The individual, de Certeau writes, ‘loses face’ as they are ‘ciphered’ through 13 Haruki

Murakami, ‘A Slow Boat to China,’ trans. Alfred Birnbaum, in The Elephant Vanishes (London: Vintage, 2003), 238.

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a ‘river of the streets, [using] a mobile language of computations and rationalities that belong to no one.’14 The representatives that formerly symbolised families, groups and established orders have been dissolved in what Lefebvre called the ‘bureaucratic city of controlled consumption.’15 The individual, de Certeau argues, must operate within these systems without fully understanding them and as a result is marginalised.

Alienated individuals Those marginalised, writes de Certeau, are not in the minority; rather, the condition is ‘massive and pervasive…the only one possible.’16 The ‘everyman’ is subjected to postmodern society’s ‘framework of levelling rationalities,’ from which no one is protected.

De Certeau’s ‘everyman’ is conceptually aligned to Freud’s ‘ordinary man’ (‘gemeine Mann’), whom the psychoanalyst used as the starting point for Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930).

The most significant tension in modern life, Freud argued, is produced by the ‘interaction of two urges:’ that towards ‘happiness,’ freedom and contentment on the one hand, and towards ‘union with others in the community,’ conformity and altruism on the other.17 It is impossible, he concludes, ‘to overlook the extent to which civilisation is built upon a renunciation of instinct.’18 Civilisation and Its Discontents, de Certeau writes, is ‘wedded’ to the masses, ‘whose common destiny is to be duped, frustrated, [and] forced to labour.’19 Murakami’s fiction, like The Practice of Everyday Life, belongs to the anti-hero. As such, it evades easy categorisation within the canon of Japanese pure/high literature (junbungaku).

This, along with his extensive referencing of Western literature, has led to criticism from several more traditional authors of Japan’s literary establishment. Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe, for example, published an article entitled ‘The Novelist’s Lament’ in 1986, in which he complained that there is not enough ‘serious’ literature committed to social change for the modern Japanese audience.20 It is certainly true that Murakami’s characters take little interest in political or social struggle: they are typically unemployed, and either excessively caught up with things such as clothing or food, or bored with life. The narrator of The Year of Spaghetti (2005) for example, projects a not untypical frivolousness when he declares that ‘in 1971, I cooked spaghetti to live, and lived to cook spaghetti. Steam rising from the pot was my pride and joy, tomato sauce bubbling up in the saucepan my one great hope in

14 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday 15 Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in

Life, v. the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (London: Transaction

Publishers, 1984), 68.

16 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xvii.

17 Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (London: W.W. Norton, 1989), 105.

18 Ibid. 52.

19 Ibid. 3.

20 In this article Oe writes that ‘Japanese intellectuals, including students at the major metropolitan universities, no longer look to serious literary writing for new models of the future.’ (p.6) Quoted via John Whittier Treat on ‘Yoshimoto Banana writes home,’ Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Summer, 1993), 353-387.

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life.’21 His protagonists are bored and jaded, but instead of human interaction seek out their favourite food, clothes and books. At once constrained and unconcerned by the massive frameworks around them, they are isolated ‘without being able to escape,’22 and as such are analogous to de Certeau’s ‘everyman.’ Alienated, they retreat to phantom worlds of their own making.

A Kafkaesque focus on loneliness haunts Murakami’s fiction. The narrator of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995), for example, hears ‘the roots of loneliness creeping through [him] when the world is hushed at four o’clock in the morning,’23 and the narrator of Sputnik Sweetheart (1999) asks whether ‘the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?’24 In The Anthropologist as Hero (1963) Susan Sontag records that the ‘inhuman acceleration of historical change’ has brought about a ‘felt unreliability’ of experience. This, she argues, ‘has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo.’25 Murakami’s work problematises the incompletely conceptualised relationship of the individual to capitalist society. The rapid development of which, having happened even faster in Japan than in Europe, appears to have left Murakami’s generation affluent but ‘homeless.’26 The social and spatial slipperiness that characterises his work affirms and exacerbates Sontag’s vertigo. Unlike Japan’s preceding (war-time) generations, Murakami’s characters have not gone through identity-defining conflict, and therefore find themselves unable to identify with, let alone make ties to, any recognisable social structures. It is perhaps not surprising therefore that the protagonists’ capacity for struggle is neutralised.

A paradoxical sympathy for both the characters’ desire for systems and the deep suspicion of such systems’ authenticity lies at the heart of Murakami’s work.

Power Since the publication of Hear the Wind Sing (1979), Murakami’s narratives have tended to revolve around an invisible form of power. The protagonist of Dance Dance Dance (1988), for example, recalls that:

21 Haruki

Murakami, ‘The Year of Spaghetti,’ The New Yorker, November 21 2005, accessed October 18, 2013. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/11/21/051121fi_fiction.

22 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xxiv.

23 Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, trans. Jay Rubin (London: Vintage, 2003), 341.

24 Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart, trans. Philip Gabriel (London: Vintage, 2002), 196.

25 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Penguin Books, 1966), 69.

26 The so-called Japanese Post-War economic ‘miracle’ records the phenomenon of the country’s record period of growth between the end of World War II and the Cold War. Chalmers Johnson gave a highly influential account of this in his work MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975 (California: Stanford University Press, 1982). In this work, Johnson stressed the ‘role of the developmental state in the economic miracle. (p.17) ‘Over the post-war era, 1946 to 1976,’ he writes, ‘the Japanese economy increased 55-fold. By the end of our period Japan accounted for about 10 percent of the world’ economic activity though occupying only 0.3 percent of the world’s surface and supporting about 3 present of the world’s population.’ (p.6)

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(Fig. 2) Thomas Struth. Shinju-ku (TDK), Tokyo 1986, 1986.

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Although I didn’t think so at the time, things were a lot simpler in 1969. All you had to do to express yourself was throw rocks at riot police. But with today’s sophistication, who’s in a position to throw rocks? Who’s going to brave what tear gas? C’mon, that’s the way it is. Everything is rigged, tied into a massive capital web, and beyond this web there’s another web. Nobody’s going anywhere. You throw a rock and it will come right back at you.27

When there was an identifiable power structure (be it the emperor, riot police or the state) for the protagonist to target his protests at, he was, he says, able to establish social bonds. Now however, he has only a vague understanding of postmodern ‘web-like’ power structures. De Certeau references Michel Foucault when he proposes that, rather than coming from a ‘single, solitary sight,’ power is now generated by ‘micro technical processes.’ In his essay Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him (1987), Maurice Blanchot writes that Foucaldian power ‘comes from below, from the depths of the social body, deriving from local, mobile, passing – and occasionally minute – forces.’ ‘Their convergence,’ Blanchot concludes, ‘grants them hegemony.’28 Similarly de Certeau asserts that ‘large institutions have been sapped of their strength’ by ‘silent technologies [that] determine or short-circuit institutional stage directions.’29 Mechanisms of control, wrote Foucault, ‘all tend, like prison, to exercise the power of normalisation:’30 surveillance generalises discipline. This ‘plague-like’ spread of technology forbade ‘the right to disappear, which is still denied us today, in one form or another.’31 Technology, Foucault, Blanchot and de Certeau agree, has produced our contemporary panoptic space in which discipline is everywhere, and increasingly assertive.

In After Dark (2004), the porter warns that the walls of the Love Hotel Alphaville ‘have ears - and digital cameras.’32 The novel, narrated from the panoptic view of a narrator-ascamera, is set over the course of one night, ‘zooming in’ on different characters. ‘Our line of sight,’ it begins, ‘chooses an area of concentrated brightness and, focusing there, silently descends to it.’33 Murakami’s use of ‘our’ implicates the reader in voyeuristic contemplation of the spectacle of the city. One character, who at first appears to be a conventional married, 27 Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance, trans. Alfred Birnbaum (London: Vintage, 2003), 55.

28 Maurice Blanchot, ‘Michel Foucault as I Imagine him,’ Foucault/Blanchot (New York: Zone Books,

96.

1987),

29 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xiv.

30 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books,

1991), 308.

31 Blanchot, Foucault/Blanchot, 84.

32 Haruki Murakami, After Dark, trans. Jay Rubin (London: Harvill Secker, 2007), 74. ‘Love hotels,’ Sarah Chaplin explains in Japanese Love Hotels: A Cultural History (London: Routledge, 2007), ‘represent a significant aspect of contemporary Japanese culture. They primarily cater for the demands of couples seeking space dedicated to sexual intimacy on a short-term basis,’ (p.1) and are generally available to rent for two-hour periods or all night. ‘About 1 percent,’ she writes, ‘of the Japanese population use a Love Hotel on any given day.’ (p.3) ‘The Love Hotel is both a product of modernity, in terms of its rationality of ends, but is simultaneously postmodern in terms of its means of achieving these…dominated by issues of consumption and identity.’ (p. 6) In Love Hotels, discretion is key: an illuminated board in the reception typically shows photographs of all of the rooms with those that are vacant lit, and with transactions of keys and payment carried out automatically.

33 Murakami, After Dark, 3.

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middle-aged Tokyo office worker, is caught on camera leaving the ‘windowless and stuffy’ Alphaville hotel room, where he has just beaten up a prostitute. Another has fallen into a permanent state of sleep, and we observe her story in parallel to the others: ‘our viewpoint,’ Murakami writes, ‘takes the form of a midair camera that can move freely around [her] room.’34 Characters are under surveillance by both city and reader. The Tokyo of After Dark, and indeed of subsequent novels, including the 1Q84 (2009-10), named in reference to George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), is constantly surveyed.35 The perspective is not the restricted view of one character, but rather that from multiple, camera-like angles. We (the reader) are accomplices to the surveillance, granting us power, and thereby corresponding to Foucault’s systems of control discussed in Discipline and Punish (1975).

The Hard-Boiled Wonderland (HBW) in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985) represents a Tokyo of the near future. Here, two powers compete for dominance: ‘The System monopolizes everything under the sun and The Factory monopolizes everything in the shadows.’36 Other than working as a ‘Calcutech’ for The System, the steadfast protagonist lives an isolated, quiet life. That is, until two thugs sent by an unknown force (most likely The Factory) rip off his front door and methodically destroy his apartment: He overturned the bed, slit the mattress, rifled through my wardrobe, dumped my desk drawers onto the floor, ripped the air-conditioner panel off the wall. He knocked over the trash, then ploughed through the bedding closet, breaking whatever happened to be in the way.37

This ‘destruction for the sake of destruction,’ the narrator muses, leaves his apartment resembling ‘a near-future world turned wasteland buried deep in its own garbage, [reminding me of] a science-fiction novel I’d read.’ Like the steel door and its mangled frame, he ultimately realises that his apartment’s privacy and security were illusions easily shattered.

The forces acting on the protagonist absurd and invisible, and so, not unexpectedly, the novel soon descends into farce. Just as Franz Kafka’s Joseph K. must leave his bedroom to enter a court of endless lobbies, corridors and anti-chambers in The Trial (1925) for his quest to be acquitted of an unknown crime, so must Murakami’s narrator descend into a labyrinthine network of underground sewers, tunnels and laboratories. To access the scientist able to save the narrator from immanent (psychological) destruction, he must undertake a claustrophobic journey underground:

34 Ibid. 25.

35 The characters

in the novels itself refer to George Orwell’s conception of Big Brother, whose overseeing role has been taken on, in 1Q84, by the Little People. ‘There’s no longer any place for a Big Brother in this real world of ours,’ the professor explains to the narrator Tengo, ‘instead, these so-called Little People have come on the scene. Interesting verbal contrast, don’t you think?’ Haruki Murakami, 1Q84, trans. Jay Rubin (London: Vintage, 2012), 321.

36 Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, trans. Alfred Birnbaum (London: Vintage, 2003), 137.

37 Ibid. 153.

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(Fig. 3) Anymous hotel Hotel Corridor

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The passage was smaller than anything we had come through this far. We had to crawl on all fours. It led us through intestinal twists and turns, sometimes angling up near vertically, dropping straight back down, or looping over like a rollercoaster.38

Like the sprawling cities of Murakami’s struggling protagonists, those of science fiction film are, Lara Schrijver argues, ‘in fact an interior.’ She cites Barbarella (1968), in which ‘none of the escalators or doors lead outside, and even the roads have ceilings and fluorescent lighting.’ The ‘corridic’ nature of cities that are ‘one huge interior,’ she proposes, is connected with a wish to control our environment. Their representation, Schrijver suggests, raises the question as to whether our own urban environments are turning into ‘vast living rooms in which we are all captive;’ ultimately asking whether we ‘escape’ from our extensive ‘technological, functional spaces?’39 In Postmodernism, Jameson proposes that John Portman’s Westin Bonaventure Hotel (1976) is ‘a full blown postmodern building.’

Similarly, the multiple entrances to the hotel have, he writes, been designed to establish the hotel as a self-encompassing world; ‘a kind of miniature city.’40 The Hôtel Dauphin, with its restaurants, lounges, tennis courts, health club and shopping arcade is similar to the Bonaventure Hotel: after having spent an afternoon here the narrator comments that it is ‘practically an amusement park. The world is full of ways to waste time.’41

Corridors Murakami’s continuous spaces often function to accentuate the apparent impossibility of exit. Here, claustrophobia is created not by the shortness of space, but rather by its length. In Corridor: Media Architecture in American Fiction (2013), Kate Marshall writes that ‘postmodern corridic abysses’ have dominated ‘recursive fictions in the latter half of the twentieth century.’42 Before her, Robin Evans sought to write the ideological history of the corridor. In Figures, Doors and Passages (1978) he proposes this type of space is tied to changing social perceptions of interiority and private/public. The introduction of the corridor, Evans writes, both enabled access to every room in a house and necessitated compartmentalisation. This is to the detriment, he believes, of ‘an architecture that recognises passion, carnality and sociality.’43 For Evans, the corridor is the ultimate index of architectural modernity, implicated in the marginalisation of its users. Hotels, a typology

38 Ibid. 302.

39 Lara Schrijver,

‘From Alphaville to Cyberville: The City of the Future in Science Fiction Films,’ OASE, 66, (2005), 38.

40 Jameson, Postmodernism, 48.

41 Murakami, Dance Dance Dance, 29.

42 Kate Marshall, Corridor: Media Architecture in American Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 28.

43 Robin Evans, ‘Figures, Doors and Passage,’ in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (London: AA Publications, 1997), 90.

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dependent on the corridor, are a recurrent setting in Murakami’s fiction.44 In The Wind-up Bird Chronicle for example, the narrator must enter an endless network of passages, like ‘venturing into a vast desert without a compass,’ in an attempt to escape unknown forces mobilised by his media-mogul brother-in-law: I turned several corners. My filthy tennis shoes moved without a sound over the carpet. I couldn’t hear a thing – no voices, no music, no TV, not even a ventilator fan or a lift. The hotel was silent, like a ruin forgotten by time. I turned many corners and passed many doors. The corridor forked again and again…my sense of direction was gone. I felt no nearer to anything in particular.45

Throughout the novel the narrator is searching for his wife. Eventually, he realises that she is hidden in a room off the endless corridors of his dreams. At one point these are completely dark, and so a ‘faceless man’ leads him to the room, as if ‘playing some kind of game in the dark.’ They rush ‘around another corner, down a short staircase, through a small secret door, through a low-ceilinged hidden passageway, into yet another corridor.’

This ‘strange, intricate route,’ the narrator muses, ‘felt like an endless journey through the bowels of a huge bronze figure;’46 referring to the archetypal Labyrinth. Mythically associated with the hidden, dark aspects of inner consciousness, the ‘prototype,’ Oshima reminds Kafka in Kafka on the Shore (2003), ‘is, in a word, guts. Which means that the principle for the labyrinth is inside you. And that correlates to the labyrinth outside.47 When The Wind-up Bird Chronicle’s narrator finally reaches the room, as always, is it extremely dark: ‘the chandelier was not lit. A small wall lamp gave off a gloomy light, the only source of illumination in the room. The curtains were closed tight.’48 He enters the hotel room again by later passing through the ‘ordinary concrete wall’ of an underground well. The ‘strange, slippery sensation’ of passing through the ‘hard, expressionless, and slightly damp’ wall, he observes, was ‘like tunnelling through a mass of gelatin.’49 Consistently, Murakami’s characters confront their dark drives in the darkest of spaces. Endless tunnels and corridors stand in for the Labyrinth, and serve to spatialise the narrators’ struggle to reclaim something lost: which is, more often than not, an ersatz attempt to reclaim a sense of their own personal identity.

44 As

well as the Hotel Alphaville in After Dark, there is The Dolphin Hotel (later, l’Hôtel Dauphin) in Dance, Dance, Dance and A Wild Sheep Chase, the unnamed hotel in Wind-up Bird Chronicle, and the Hotel Okura in 1Q84, amongst others.

45 Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, trans. Jay Rubin (London: Vintage, 2003), 553. The narrator’s architectural disorientation reminds me of one of many scenes in The Trial when K. is lost in the court. At one point, for example, he asks: “I’d like to go, how do we get to the way out?’ ‘You haven’t lost your bearings already?’ asked the usher in surprise. ‘You go along here as far as the corner and then to the right along the corridor straight to the door.’

‘Come with me,’ said K., ‘show me the way. I’ll make a mistake, there are so many ways here.’ ‘There’s only one way,’ said the usher, getting a bit reproachful.” (p. 52.)

46 Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, 572.

47 Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore, trans. Philip Gabriel (London: Vintage, 2005), 379.

48 Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, 102.

49 Ibid. 249-250.

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(Fig. 4) Underground flooding reservoir in Saitama, Tokyo.

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In the short story Dabchick (2006) the narrator, following instructions on a post card, descends down a narrow concrete flight of stairs. Here, he finds himself in a ‘corridor that stretched on for ever;’

with ceilings so high that the passageway felt more like a dried-up drainage canal than a corridor. It had no decoration of any kind. It was an authentic corridor that was all corridor and nothing but corridor. The lighting was feeble and uneven, as if the light itself had finally reached its destination after a series of terrible mishaps…the place was silent.50

He is searching for a door, behind which someone is waiting to offer him a new job, but encounters only blank wall. He has no choice but to carry on however, and eventually finds a door protected by password. The only word that occurs to him is ‘dabchick.’ This is the correct answer: the ‘boss,’ it turns out, is a dabchick (a ‘palm-sized bird’), reminding us that our daily lives are perhaps also governed by such small absurdities.51 In HardBoiled Wonderland and the end of the World, the narrator is lead down another extremely long corridor: ‘Turning corners, going up and down flights of stairs, we must have walked five or six buildings worth.’ ‘Like an Escher print’ he walks round and round, but ‘the surroundings never seem to change. Marble floors, muffin-white walls, wooden doors with random door numbers. Stainless steel door knobs. Not a window in sight.’52 Tunnels, deep holes and underground passages seem to spatialise not only unconscious struggle (explored in more detail later in this dissertation), but also the unsettling and multilayered problem of communication. The narrator’s effort to access his wife at the centre of the hotel, for example, points to the paradox of our modern mediated condition. Murakami’s architecture exaggerates the labyrinthine series of motions that we undertake as part of modern daily life.

Illegible cities The unreadable and frequently shape shifting city is a recurrent setting in Murakami’s novels. Without markers such as districts, pathways and landmarks, the cityscape is rendered illegible, and the protagonist is left, as Jameson writes, unable to ‘map (in their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves.’53 50 Haruki Murakami, ‘Dabchick,’ trans. Jay Rubin, in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (London: Vintage, 2007), 129.

51 Again, I am reminded of Kafka and his fable, told to K. by a priest, ‘before the law’ in The Trial. ‘Before the law stands a door-keeper. A man comes to this door-keeper and asks entry into the law,’ the priest begins. ‘But the door-keeper says that he cannot grant him entry now.’ (p. 166) Indeed, Murakami cites Kafka as a key influence upon his fiction (see interview by John Wray in the Paris Review 170 (2004), for example. Accessed September 12, 2013. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2/the-art-of-fictionno-182-haruki-murakami.

52 Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, 10.

53 Jameson, Postmodernism, 51.

18

Marginality

Steven Marcus, in his essay ‘Reading the Illegible’ (1976), suggests that a significant factor of the ‘distress’ felt by people in modern cities is ‘their sense that the city is unintelligible and illegible;’ the city’s ‘discontinuities and obscurities,’ Marcus writes, ‘seem to compose the structure of a chaos, a landscape whose human, social and natural parts may be related simply by accidents, a random agglomeration of mere appearances.’ When the urban landscape is unable to be ‘perceived as a coherent system of signs,’ it is experienced ‘as estrangement.’54 Typically Murakami’s narrators move rapidly through urban space, either on foot or by car, marked out not by paths, districts and landmarks, but rather freeways, chain restaurants and twenty-four- hour food stores. In Kafka on the Shore for example, the narrator describes the city as seen through a car window: We join the highway and pass a number of towns, a giant billboard for a loans company, a petrol station with gaudy decorations, a glass-enclosed restaurant, a Love Hotel made to look like a European castle, and abandoned video shop with only its sign left, a pachinko place with an enormous car-park, McDonald’s, 7-Eleven, Yoshinoya, Denny’s…55

The Tokyo of the near future represented by the HBW in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is a similarly aestheticised landscape of signs and symbols. This corresponds to Jameson’s notion of the ‘new hyperspace,’ in which the city is a ‘degraded landscape of schlock and kitsch…of advertising and motels, of the late show and grade-B Hollywood film, of so called paraliterature.’56 Our ‘perceptual habits,’ he writes, were formed in an older, modernist, space. Consequently, ‘human subjects,’ Jameson argues, ‘have not kept pace with that evolution…we do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace.’57 Murakami’s cities manifest just such Jamesonian ‘mutation’ in built space. Impossible for the reader to map, they are a series of dynamic realms, populated by architectural objects, images and chaotic attractors. Roland Barthes’s description of the Japanese train station in Empire of Signs (1970) corresponds to Murakami’s unmappable city, in that it is: crossed by a thousand functional trajectories, from the journey to the purchase, from the garment to food: a train can open onto a shoe stall. Dedicated to commerce, to transition, to departure, and yet kept in a unique structure, the station is stripped of that sacred character which ordinarily qualifies the major landmarks of our cities.58

Murakami’s cities have no centre and little internal logic, serving only to disorientate their inhabitants. In Kafka on the Shore for example, alternating chapters tell the story of two Marcus, ‘Reading the Illegible’ in The Victorian City: Images and Realities, ed. Harold James Dyos and Michael Wolff (London: Routledge, 1973) 257.

55 Murakami, Kafka on the Shore, 167.

56 Jameson, Postmodernism, 3.

57 Ibid. 39.

58 Barthes, Empire of Signs, 38.

54 Steven

19

20

Marginality

protagonists. Kafka Tamura is a fifteen year-old who runs away from his father’s house and Nakata is an elderly man who is mentally defective, but able to speak to cats. The characters move through space differently, with their separate narratives at once opposite and converging. Kafka, bird-like, quickly moves from one city to the other on bullet trains or the subway, in search of a place that will ‘take him in,’ with his urge to shelter as the driving force of the narrative. Nakata (cat-like) gradually moves away from his home, on foot, in search of a missing feline. In the city both encounter strange, dreamlike and vicious characters that seem to step out naturally from the city. Colonel Sanders, a pimp and ‘abstract concept’ for example, invites one character to follow him, moving ‘so fast that he resembled a veteran speed walker.’ The Colonel, the character observes, ‘seemed to know every nook and cranny of the city. He took short cuts up dark, narrow staircases, turning sideways to squeeze through the narrow passages between houses.’59 In 1Q84 the narrator inadvertently leaves 1984 (the ‘real’ world of the novel) and enters the parallel world of 1Q84. Like the earlier corridors and walls, the path between the two worlds is architectural: in this case, it is an emergency exit ladder from the edge of Tokyo’s Metropolitan Expressway. As she descends, ‘the din of the city envelops her:’ the noise of ‘car engines, blaring horns, the scream of an automobile burglar alarm, an old war song echoing from a right-wing sound truck, a sledgehammer cracking concrete’ presses in on her, making her feel ‘almost seasick.’60 Upon reaching the ground, she soon begins to notice discontinuities between the world she has left and the one in which she now finds herself. The Tokyo of 1Q84 is, like the HBW, continuous, slippery and disorientating.

Murakami’s novels address the marginalisation of the protagonist, who consistently lacks the solid ground from which to make sense of their reality, through his representation of endlessly interiorised and surveyed cities.

59 Murakami, 60 Murakami,

21

Kafka on the Shore, 291.

1Q84, Vol. 1, 38.

2

SIMULACRA AND SURFACE

The architectural fluencies of Murakami’s worlds are not altogether unlike the ‘simulated space’ of television, for what we see there is only questionably real, and virtually anything could take place. Murakami’s space is characterised by imagery, signs and symbols, and so can be usefully considered in terms of the simulacrum. The expression, from Latin, means ‘semblance’, ‘image’ or ‘likeness.’ The Oxford English Dictionary defined it firstly as ‘a material image, made as a representation of some deity, person, or thing;’ emphasising its plastic nature. By the nineteenth century, the term was being used negatively: it is a ‘mere image’ or a ‘specious likeness’ of something, but without ‘possessing its substance or proper qualities.’61 In Postmodernism, Jameson quotes Plato to define simulacra as ‘identical copies for which no original has ever existed.’ The ‘culture of the simulacrum,’ Jameson writes, comes to life in a society where ‘exchange value has been generalised to the point at which the very memory of use value is effaced.’62 For Jean Baudrillard, the relationship between simulation and the simulated is particularly significant, suggesting in Simulacra and Simulations (1981) that rather than being merely a ‘copy of the real,’ the simulacrum is truthful in its own right. It defines, he proposes, a new reality: that of hyperreality. He argues that simulation blurs the distinctions between the ‘true’ and the ‘false’ and the ‘real’ and ‘imaginary,’ ultimately negating the concept of reality.63 Baudrillard begins his essay by referring to Jorge Luis Borges’ short story Of Exactitude in Science (1946), in which the ruler of an ancient empire commissions a huge map. The drawing (at 1:1 scale) covers the entire nation. However, with the inevitable disintegration of the empire, the map falls apart, leaving only ‘ragged tatters’ in the ‘sands’ of the desert. Baudrillard then inverts the fable to define contemporary reality: the ‘ragged tatters’ of reality, he writes, are now buried in the Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘simulacrum,’ accessed November 29, 2013, http://www.oed.com/ view/Entry/180000 62 Jameson, Postmodernism, 18.

63 Jean Baudrillard, ‘Simulacra and Simulations,’ in Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 168.

61

23

Andreas Gursky’s photograph depicts an exhibition of the work of architects Herzog & de Meuron in an exhibition hall at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Parallel tables span the width of the image, reinforcing its horizontality, whilst their protective Perspex coverings reflect the repeating rows of fluorescent tubes above.

(Fig. 5) Andreas Gursky, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1995.

24

Simulacra and Surface

‘desert of the simulated.’ When the map precedes the territory, hyperreality is generated.

Space of the simulacrum The simulacrum, Baudrillard writes, is the ‘synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.’64 Hyperreality is spatial; and its ultimate manifestation, he proposes, is Disneyland. ‘Composed by the ‘play of illusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world, etc.,’ the theme park, Baudrillard writes, is a ‘perfect model of all entangled orders of simulation.’65 Disneyland’s home Los Angeles is in addition, a city ‘without space or dimensions…nothing more than an immense script and perpetual motion picture,’66 affirming the theme park’s simulaic status. The ‘new spatial logic of the simulacrum,’ Jameson proposes, has ‘a momentous effect on what used to be historical time.’67 He cites the ‘extraordinary space’ of contemporary non-figurative painting in which: all the images and icons of culture spill and float, haphazard, like a logjam of the visual, bearing off with them everything from the past under the name of ‘tradition’ that arrived in the present in time to be reified visually. This is the sense in which I associated such painting with the term deconstructive, for it constitutes an immense analytic dissection of everything and a lancing of the visual abscess.68

Murakami’s simulaic cities are analogous to Jameson’s ‘extraordinary space.’ Similarly, Barthes in The Empire of Signs describes the public place in Japan as a series of vivid ‘instantaneous events.’ ‘The sign of which,’ he writes, ‘does away with itself before any particular signified has had the time to ‘take.’’69 Through the textualisation of ‘superficial’ phenomena, Murakami’s fiction confronts the fluidity of postmodern (visual) space.

Displaying close affinities with the American city novel, his landscapes are a pastiche of high and low representational forms: a ‘degraded landscape’ of signs and symbols.

In The Postmodern Condition (1979) Jean-François Lyotard proposes that eclecticism is ‘the degree zero of contemporary general culture.’ Knowledge, he writes, is ‘a matter of TV games:’ ‘one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and ‘retro’ clothes in Hong Kong.’70 Murakami’s fiction logs just such trivia and so appears, some argue, to value superficiality over complexity and low- over high-brow culture. This aligns it with the work of authors

64 Ibid. 167.

65 Baudrillard, ‘Simulacra and Simulations,’ 171.

66 Ibid. 172.

67 Jameson, Postmodernism, 18 68 Ibid. 175.

69 Barthes, Empire of Signs, 108.

70 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition:

A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 76.

25

Simulacra and Surface

such as Bret Easton Ellis and Raymond Chandler, whom Murakami has cited as influences.71 James Annesley labels this and other fiction as ‘blank fiction,’ denoting a style of novel in which a detailed realist plot and the character are less important than the impression of a detailed ‘surface.’ This ‘surface,’ he suggests, is typically created by a surfeit of references to pop-cultural ephemera and consumer products, the representation of which Annesley argues are significant ‘fantasies in which the features of late-twentieth century America are traced, disclosed and made intelligible.’72 Murakami’s fiction, like that of Annesley’s chosen authors, reminds us how enmeshed our lives are with the world of media representation.

In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Guy Debord proposes that when images mediate social relationships they become the spectacle at the heart of ‘society’s real unreality.’ Debord further asserts that ‘all that was once directly lived has become mere representation.’ 73 The individual ‘condemned to the passive acceptance’ of their alien reality, is ‘driven into a form of madness.’ Their only means of reacting to this fate, he argues, is that of ‘resorting to magical devices.’74

Hard-Boiled Wonderland Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World presents two settings in a pattern of alternating chapters. The Hard-Boiled Wonderland (HBW) is a futuristic representation of Tokyo, and the other, apparently opposite realm, is represented by the End of the World (EW), in which signs of television, consumerism, fashion and technology are conspicuous in their absence. The EW is an eerie pastiche, of archetypal features of the Western town that appears to have been designed to appeal to Japanese stereotypes of a European city; its clock tower, library, watchtower, deep forest, meadows and stone bridges lending it a Disneyesque falseness. (see fig. 6) Enclosed by an enormous wall, a selfconscious fictitiousness prevails. In a Jamesonian manner the past has become ‘a vast collection of images.’75 Throughout the novel, it becomes apparent that the EW is indeed not real. Rather, it is a parallel world created by the narrator’s unconscious, into which his waking mind is gradually being subsumed. His ‘cognitive circuit’ has been altered as part of a scientific experiment, and the EW is a visualisation of the resulting dysfunction. The utopic town is, in fact, composed of accumulated images stored in his consciousness. Its representative and spatial logic, therefore, is comparable to that of the HBW. Both cities, 71 In

an interview in The Paris Review, Murakami says that when he began to write fiction, he ‘didn’t know how to write in Japanese—I’d read almost nothing of the works of Japanese writers—so I borrowed the style, structure, everything, from the books I had read—American books or Western books.’ Reportedly Murakami, who also undertakes the translation of popular fiction from Japanese into English, used to write his fiction first in English, only afterwards translating back it into Japanese.

72 James Annesley, Blank Fiction: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 140.

73 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 13.

74 Ibid. 153.

75 Jameson, Postmodernism, 18.

26

Simulacra and Surface

(Fig. 6) Map of the End of the World.

27

Simulacra and Surface

like Jameson’s description of magic realist film, ‘enjoin a visual spell, an enthrallment to the image in its present of time, which is quite distinct.’76 The reader gets their first indication of the connection between the two worlds when, as the narrator reads one evening, he becomes aware that his unconscious mind is in another place: the fate of the character, he muses, is spatial; claustrophobically predetermined, it is a ‘world completely surrounded by walls:’ I shut the book and bid the last thimbleful of Jack Daniels farewell, turning over in my mind the image of a world within walls. I could picture it, with no effort at all. A very high wall, a very large gate. Dead quiet. Me inside. Beyond that, the scene was hazy. Details of the world seemed to be distinct enough, yet at the same time everything around me was dark and blurred. It was like a scene from a movie, a historical blockbuster. But which? Not El Cid, not Ben Hur, not Spartacus.

No, the image had been something my subconscious dreamed up.77

The EW, or world of his inner mind, is built from the narrator’s extensive stock of cultural references; it is a simulation of a simulation. The narrator has a habit of seeing his everyday experience as if it were part of a film, allowing him to maintain a detached composure.

This corresponds to Barthes’ notion, developed in Camera Lucida (1980), of the ‘punctum.’

Barthes sought here to write a theory of photographic meaning, identifying firstly where this begins and ends with the image. When attracted to the punctum, or, arresting small detail, he writes that he is like ‘a primitive, a child-or a maniac; I dismiss all knowledge, all culture, I refuse to inherit anything from another eye than my own.’78 Similarly, the narrator’s stock of images gives his experience a Barthesian surface level meaning. This leads him to experience an infinite sense of dé ja vu: he sees everything as if he’s seen it before. Debord further argues that the consumption of commodities and their spectacular images is ‘pseudo-response’ to a ‘communication to which no response is possible.’79 Materially therefore, the simulacrum is another expression of estrangement. Through his presentation of trivial everyday objects - what is present - Murakami highlights what is absent - the sense of self.

Against metanarratives Gilles Deleuze argued that ‘modernity is defined by the power of the simulacrum,’ contending in Plato and the Simulacrum (1983) that:

76 Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (London: Routledge, 1990), 130.

77 Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland, 164.

78 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard

51.

79 Debord,

(London: Vintage, 2000),

The Society of the Spectacle, 153.

28

Simulacra and Surface

It is not in the great forests nor on pathways that philosophy is elaborated, but in the cities and street, including even their most factitious aspects…The artificial and the simulacrum are not the same thing. They are even opposed. The factitious is always a copy of a copy, which must be pushed to the point where it changes its nature and turns into a simulacrum (the moment of Pop Art).80

The simulacrum is positive, he writes, since it is a device by which ‘privileged’ ideals may be ‘challenged and overturned.’81 Lyotard comparably defined postmodernism as the ‘incredulity towards metanarratives,’82 writing in The Postmodern Condition that it prefers ‘little narratives’ to one ‘grand narrative.’ The refusal to adhere to a sweeping overview, exemplified by the simulacrum, gives the postmodern subject valuable acuity. When reading Murakami, the reader must attempt to recover the narrative from a series of images and fragments. The surplus of intertextual references and allusions seems, tantalizingly, to point to a single explanatory master narrative, yet the viability of this is consistently denied.

Enlightenment thought, Lyotard argues (perhaps generalising), was sustained by the metanarratives. This in turn binds notions of justice and truth ultimately working, he argues, to suppress and control the individual. The imposition of a ‘universality’ and ‘totality’ on a disparate set of events, actions and things, it has been proposed, legitimises courses of (political) action through a re-ordering of events. In The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Murakami weaves together a series of seemingly separate narratives with (often unpredictable) continuous threads. Each is told from varying perspectives to the protagonist Toru, establishing complex relationships between characters and spaces and historical events.

The novel, a bewildering mixture of historical periods, narrative voices, and the magical and realistic, employs simulacra to undermine spatial (and indeed, political and cultural) continuity and linearity.

The story told by Lieutenant Mamiya of his time in Manchuria, for example, challenges a Japanese grand historical narrative that might seek to ignore aspects of its most violent past.

Caught trespassing in outer Mongolia, Mamiya is ‘abandoned deep in a well in the middle of the desert at the edge of the world, overcome with intense pain and total darkness.’83 In another ‘chronicle’ told to the narrator, Chinese prisoners are told by Japanese soldiers to dig a large hole. After it is finished, they must throw the corpses of fellow Chinese prisoners into it, shortly before their own bayoneted bodies end up there. Murakami’s reference to these events here and in other novels, challenges their historical objectification and isolation. In a broader sense, through The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and other narratives, he is asserting the significance of the individualised, localised story as part of an interpretive construction, even if only temporarily useful. Through their continuity, space here serves as one device to link disparate narratives: the well, or deep hole, in particular, is a motif that constantly re-appears. Often serving as a conduit between the conscious and unconscious 80 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Plato and the Simulacrum,’ trans. Rosalind Krauss, October, 27 (1983), 55.

81 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 1997), 69.

82 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, xxiv.

83 Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, 164.

29

Simulacra and Surface

mind, his well’s importance is recognised by Toru, whose capacity as a healer grows directly from his need to own and control the land upon which it is located. He first decides to go down into the well, which he comes across in the garden of an abandoned house in his neighbourhood, only to find, upon wishing to leave it, that the ladder is gone. When he comes to own the well, he has it rigged with a system allowing him to cover, enter and leave it at his choosing: it becomes apparent that he must go into the well to reach the space of his unconscious mind. His description of it reflects Lieutenant Mamiya’s, given earlier: The sense of reality subsides bit by bit, and the closeness of the well envelops me in its place.

Down here, the well is warm and silent, and the softness of the inner earth caresses my skin…I pull on the rope and close the well lid…the darkness is now complete. The well mouth is closed, all light is gone…I don’t even have a torch with me. This is like a confession of faith. I mean to show ‘them’ that I am trying to accept the darkness in its entirety.84

Murakami entangles images of the characters’ architectural experience, highlighting not only that the isolation of their (spatial) knowledge is a myth, but also that the ideological isolation of these characters’ experiences is impossible.

84 Ibid.

31

392.

3

SPACE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

The monument of psychoanalysis must be traversed - not bypassed - like the fine thoroughfares of a very large city, across which we can play, dream, etc.85

The space of Murakami’s protagonists’ unconscious minds is vast and architectonic, and consistently this is where their most chaotic, visceral and, ultimately, individuating experience takes place: alienated by their simulated landscape, protagonists retreat to phantom realms of their own making. This chapter is concerned with the architecture (and constituent thresholds) of these ‘realms,’ and the extent to which they mirror and distort postmodern spatial reality. In Pinball, 1973, the narrator muses on the simulaic nature of his consciousness: On any given day, something claims our attention. Anything at all, inconsequential things. A rosebud, a misplaced hat, a sweater we liked as a child, an old Gene Pitney record. A parade of trivia with no place to go. Things that bump around in our consciousness for two or three days, then go back to wherever they come from…to darkness. We’re always digging wells in our heads.

While above the wells, birds flit back and forth.86

The characteristics of dream space, or the space of the unconscious, often overlap with that of the simulacrum, discussed earlier. The ‘parade of trivia’ not only generates the ‘degraded’ space of the city, but also occupies the ‘darkness,’ or space of our inner minds, in ways of which we are not necessarily aware. It is the nature of this ‘darkness’ that particularly concerns this chapter. Murakami’s narratives consistently establish a realistic spatial setting, only to then disrupt it, sometimes subtly and sometimes violently, with the magical or bizarre. These speculative spaces are dreamlike or nightmarish, infinite or confined, everyday or fantastical, and like those of the previous chapter are complex constructions 85 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 58.

86 Murakami, Pinball, 1973, trans. Alfred Birnbaum (Tokyo: Kodanasha International, 1980), 109.

33

34

(Fig. 7) The Electric City Pachinko Parlour in Akihabara, Tokyo.

Space of the Unconscious

of referent signs. The signified here is textual (of within the novel itself), intertextual (of other literature or film) and/or contextual (of urban or Japanese architecture). These mostly enclosed spaces are where the shadowy and familiar realms intersect. The threshold between the hotel room 208 and the well in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is exemplary of the non-linear architectural fluencies within and between these spaces. Waiting in the ever-dark hotel room, the narrator hears a ‘doorknob turning slowly,’ and ‘at the very moment the light from the corridor pieced the darkness,’ he slips into the wall: It had the consistency of a gigantic mass of cold gelatine; I clamped my mouth shut to prevent it entering. The thought struck me: I’m passing through the wall! In order to go from one place to another, I was passing through a wall. And yet, even as it was happening, it seemed like the most natural thing to do...When I opened my eyes I was on the other side of the wall – at the bottom of a deep well.87

Magic Realism

Magic realism is a term coined in reference to post-expressionist art of Germany in the 1920s. German art critic Franz Roh recognised this work as distinct in its ‘attention to accurate detail, a smooth photograph-like clarity of picture and the representation of mystical non-material aspects of reality.’88 This artistic production, Maggie Ann Bowers writes in Magic(al) Realism (2004), was particularly influenced by the contemporary psychological work of Freud and Jung. Roh believed the role of this new art was, similarly, to portray the inner world of the human mind through its depiction as material reality. Such concerns soon spread to other media, with some of the first literary examples published in journal 900.Novocento (1926). This publication sought to represent the ‘mysterious and fantastic quality of reality,’ and was, along with related criticism, translated into Spanish and circulated widely amongst South American writers such as Jose Luis Borges.89 Here, where there had arguably already been a cultural tradition of the representation of the extraordinary, this criticism was highly influential.90 This discourse went on to strongly shape the work of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, who is now one of the most well known figures of the genre. The Columbian author’s novels, Bowers writes, ‘propelled the rapid adoption of this form of writing globally.’91 The paradox of magic realism is that dreamlike happenings are seamlessly integrated into material reality, into which they are accepted as matter-of-fact. The existence of both 87 Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, 247.

88 Maggie Ann Bowers, Magic(al) Realism (London: Routledge, 2004), 9.

89 Ibid. 13.

90 The Cuban author Alejo Carpentier, in particular, argued that magical

realism (or his term, marvellous realism) was already a part of South America’s natural heritage, due to the continent’s distinct and vast mixture of cultural systems and varieties of experience.

91 Bowers, Magic(al) Realism, 18.

36

Space of the Unconscious

‘real’ and the ‘unreal’ events in the text undermines the existence of both, thus critiquing the idea of ‘realistic’ representation. History, like fiction, is presented as nothing more than another text. The events in magic realist fiction do not symbolise or act as an allegory for something other in our ‘real’ lives.92 Rather they are, in a Lacanian sense, part of the construction of the equally ‘real’ subconscious (or Other). As discussed earlier, Lyotard defined postmodernism as ‘incredulity towards metanarratives;’ ‘we have suffered,’ he argues, from our nostalgia for the ‘whole and one,’ and that there is now a desire for ‘a return to terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality:’ 93 the answer is to ‘wage a war on totality.’94 Magic realist writers ‘wage war’ by disrupting categories of truth, history and reality, creating space beyond that of authoritative discourse. Jameson argues that this strategy is political: the motive for ‘the older magical content in fiction’ is tied to the modernism’s failure. ‘The characteristic nascent modernism, from Kafka to Cortazar,’ he suggests, ‘circumscribes the place of the fantastic as a determinate, marked absence at the heart of the secular world.’95 The magic realist aspects of Murakami’s address just such an absence. Despite, or perhaps as a result of, the marked unpoliticisation of his fiction, it offers a critique of the lack of understanding that the postmodern (Japanese) individual has to meaningfully define their own identity and reality – the two being so often linked.

Murakami consistently highlights the fragility of the nostalgic image as something tangible on which to found identity. In Pinball, 1973 for example, the protagonist confesses to being excessively fond of hearing about other people’s lives, musing that he ‘had stocked up a whole store of these places, like a bear getting ready for hibernation.’ He’d ‘close [his] eyes, and streets would materialize, rows of houses take shape’96 Yet, when he visits the train station of his university girlfriend’s Naoko’s story, he is unable to find what he is looking for. Although he got the train station ‘out of his system,’ he is not satisfied. ‘I couldn’t get it out of my mind, that place. Nor the fact that I loved Naoko. Nor that she was dead. After all that, I still hadn’t closed the book on anything:’97 the nostalgic image is not enough. The short story’s focus is eventually the narrator’s search for a lost pinball machine. With the help of a professor who takes him to the outskirts of Tokyo, he finds the ‘rare three-flipper spaceship model’ stored in a collector’s warehouse. He observes that this ‘gloomy edifice’ once used for cold storage by an adjacent chicken farm, ‘crouches like a waiting animal.’ He is told that he must enter alone, so he pushes on the ‘chilly iron doors,‘without a sound, reveal…a different breed of darkness.’ Upon flicking an electric switch, this gloom becomes equally ‘pure, oppressive’ illumination:

This complicated Franz Kafka’s status as a magic realist author, as his work is often interpreted as allegorical. The tension between fantastical and realistic elements is disturbed when they are understood to have two levels of meaning.

93 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, xxiv.

94 Ibid. 82.

95 Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (New York: Cornell University Press, 1981), 136.

96 Murakami, Pinball, 1973, 8.

97 Ibid. 23.

92

37

(Fig. 8) Herzog & de Meuron, Schaulager, Munchenstein, 2003.

The Schaulager is a warehouse that stores contemporary art whilst making it accessible to public view. ‘The earthy walls,’ the architects write, ‘lend the building the closed, heavy-duty appearance of a warehouse. The large volume, interrupted by only a few apertures, and with no outward indication of the positions of the interior floors and ceilings, has the commanding presence of the monolith amid the car and logistics centres that surround it, opening up only towards the street and tram stop.’ Herzog & de Meuron,1997-2001: The Complete Works (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2009), 87.

38

Space of the Unconscious

The overhead fluorescent lamps blinked on, flooding the warehouse with white light. There must have been all of a hundred fluorescent lamps. The warehouse was much bigger than it had appeared from the outside, but even so the amount of light was oppressive. I shut my eyes against the glare.98

The massive, windowless walls of the warehouse make it resemble the ‘inside of a huge refrigerator.’ Fearing that he might be unable to leave, the narrator turns to check the entrance; ‘it’d be hard,’ the narrator decides, ‘to imagine a more disturbing structure.’ He eventually finds a set of doors exactly like those of the entrance, but sealed, ‘as if painted shut.’ The inside of the warehouse is filled with 78 pinball machines in rows, reminding the narrator of an ‘elephant graveyard.’99 He walks down five narrow concrete steps and, after some hesitation, searches for an electrical power point amongst numerous defunct switches and meter boxes. When the narrator finds his machine, he also finds Naoko. He lays his hand on it, talking to it as a lost lover: ‘only then did she recognise me and smile up in my direction. It was a smile just like old times. I smiled, too.’100 It becomes apparent that the search for the pinball machine was in fact an attempt to make sense of the unreachable aspects of his past. The understanding of which might ultimately lead to his forming a stronger sense of his own identity. All he finds, however, is another unsatisfactory surrogate image for his desire.

In Murakami’s fiction truth (materially, spatially, or otherwise) is a relative concept.

Typically, protagonists are able to move easily between imaginary landscape and spaces. In a passage from Kafka on the Shore, for example, where the use of ‘us’ and ‘we’ indicates the presence of the reader, the narrator is a ‘total blank:’ ‘as we sit here on the old leather sofa in my father’s study,’ things begin to surface that ‘both of us can see:’ ‘sometimes fate is like

98 Ibid. 154.

99 The mind,

the scientist tells the narrator in Hard-boiled Wonderland, is ‘a black box.’ In other words, we all carry around this “elephant graveyard” inside of us. Outer space aside, this is truly humanity’s last terra incognita.’ However, he later corrects himself: ‘an “elephant factory” is more like it. There’s where you sort through countless memories and bits of knowledge, arrange the sorted chips into complex lines, combine these lines into even more complex bundles, and finally make up a cognitive system’ (p. 256). In the short story ‘The Dancing Dwarf,’ trans. Jay Rubin, in The Elephant Vanishes (2003), the protagonist works in such an elephant factory. Here, elephants are artificially manufactured– or more accurately – reconstituted. The narrator describes the gloomy part of the factory where they manufacture the legs, ‘stage 8,’ in some detail.

The ‘leg-shop’ is: housed in a low-set, spacious building, a long, narrow place with a partially sunken sandy floor. Inside, your eyes were at ground level, and narrow glass windows were the only source of illumination. Suspended from the ceiling were movable rails from which hung dozens of elephant legs. If you squinted up at them, it looked as if a huge herd of elephants was winging down from the sky. (p.254) This is an example of the uncanny continuity of imagery that Murakami employs across his fiction. The notion of the ‘elephant graveyard,’ or ‘factory,’ as the archetypal space of the unconscious clearly appeals to the author, and is made no less strange by its consistent use.

100 Murakami, Pinball, 1973, 160.

39

Space of the Unconscious

a small sandstorm that keeps changing direction.’101 We rapidly move from a ‘total blank’ to an ‘old leather sofa’ to a sandstorm, demanding more than spatial reason alone from the reader. In The Empire of Signs Barthes writes that fantasy looms large in Japanese culture, arguing that the ‘void’ created by Tokyo’s central hidden palace reinforces the ‘system of the imaginary’ for Tokyo’s residents. Furthermore, he writes that the unnamed streets of the city are set against our notion that ‘the practical is always the most rational.’102 These rational and irrational thresholds between spaces, often codified as belonging to reality or dream, are significant in Murakami’s narrative space. In Pinball, 1973, for example, the narrator, reflecting on a mouse he has trapped, muses that ‘where there’s an entrance, there’s got to be an exit.’ Most things need to work that way he says: ‘public mailboxes, vacuum cleaners, zoos, plastic condiment squeeze bottles. Of course, there are things that don’t. For example, mousetraps.’103 The fridge-cum-pinball-machine-warehouse however, had only an entrance and analogously, once in the trap, the mouse may only exit (presumably to the other side, death). The distinct and often irrational architectural threshold between realms, often confined and apparently mundane, reoccur throughout Murakami’s fiction: as well as a narrow flight of stairs in Pinball, 1973, and corridors and well walls in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, protagonists descend a narrow emergency escape stair (1Q84) travel in an extremely spacious, ‘impossibly slow’ silent elevator and travel through endless underground sewers (Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World).

The Uncanny Art historian Irene Guenther noted that ‘the juxtaposition of ‘magic’ and ‘realism’ reflected…the monstrous and marvellous Unheimlichkeit (uncanniness) within human beings and inherent in their modern technological surroundings.’104 Sigmund Freud, in his essay ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), quantified the term as ‘that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar.’105 Freud cites a disorientating journey through an unfamiliar city during which he repeatedly returned to the same (now strangely familiar) street. The uncanny, he writes, ‘is the latent ability of the familiar to suddenly become unfamiliar: ‘defamiliarized, derealized, as if in a dream.’106 In The Architectural Uncanny (1992) Anthony Vidler agrees that the ‘labyrinthine spaces of the modern city’ are uncanny in that they are ‘the sources of modern anxiety, from revolution

101 Murakami, Kafka on the Shore, 3.

102 Barthes, Empire of Signs, 33. The

palace, Barthes writes, is ‘an opaque ring of walls, streams, roofs, and trees…subsisting here, not in order to irradiate power, but to give to the entire urban movement the support of its central emptiness, forcing the traffic to make a perceptual detour.’ The ‘system of the imaginary,’ Barthes writes, is ‘spread circularly, by detours and returns the length of an empty subject.’

103 Murakami, Pinball, 1973, 14.

104 Quoted via Bowers, Magic(al) Realism, 10.

105 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny,’ in The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin, 2003), 124.

106 Ibid. 7.

40

Space of the Unconscious

and epidemic to phobia and alienation.’107 It is here that ‘psychology and pschychoanalysis have found,’ he writes, ‘a topos for the exploration of anxiety and paranoia.’108 This began with the house that ‘pretends to afford the utmost security’ whilst ‘opening itself to the secret intrusion of terror,’ and was followed by the city, which has been rendered unfamiliar by the ‘strange spatial incursions of modernity.’109 Architecture, Vidler proposes, is able to demonstrate the ‘disquieting slippage between what seems homely and what is definitely unhomely.’110 At the very beginning of 1Q84, the protagonist Aomame descends a ladder at the side of the motorway to escape unmoving traffic. Without first being aware of it, she finds herself in another city parallel to her Tokyo upon reaching the end, which is at once familiar and unfamiliar. Here the policemen wear a different uniform, there is no evidence of events and incidents that she remembers having taken place, and it appears that two moons hang in the sky: ‘this,’ she observes, ‘is starting to sound like science fiction.’111 None of the novels’ protagonists, however, seem to be aware of exactly how detached from reality they have (or might) become. ‘There has got to be an end somewhere,’ one character puts it; ‘it’s just that nothing’s labelled “This is the end.” Is the top rung of a ladder labelled, “This is the last rung. Please don’t step any higher than this”?’112 In this and other cities in Murakami’s fiction, characters are uncannily swallowed up by (ethereal or material) holes. ‘Subterranean worlds - wells, underpasses, caves, underground springs and rivers, dark alleys, subways’ Murakami notes in his non-fictional work Underground (1998), ‘have always fascinated me and are an important motif in my novels.’113 The strange Shinjuku of After Dark, filled by 24-hour cafes and Love Hotels resembles a ‘deep fissure.’ Here, ‘voids’ open ‘in the interval between midnight and the time the sky grows light…No one can predict when or where such abysses will swallow people, or when or where they will spit them out.’114 The Hotel Alphaville is one such ‘abyss.’

Hotels, as discussed in previous chapters, are a recurrent setting in Murakami’s fiction.

The Dolphin Hotel of Dance Dance Dance and later (rebuilt) in A Wild Sheep Chase, is small and undistinguished, yet, ‘its undistinguishedness was metaphysical. No neon sign, no large signboard, not even a real entryway.’115 Inside the narrator notices that ‘no detail seemed right. Look at anything in the place and you’d find yourself tilting your head a few degrees.’ Inside he unexpectedly finds the ‘sheep professor’ crucial to the narrator’s task, who lives at the top of one of the hotel’s many staircases. When directed there, the narrator notices that the air ‘was chilly and damp. The lights were dim, scarcely revealing the dust 107 Anthony

Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1992), i.

108 Ibid. xiii.

109 Ibid. 10.

110 Ibid. ii.

111 Murakami, 1Q84, vol.1, 146.

112 Ibid. 116.

113 Murakami, Underground, 239.

114 Murakami, After Dark, 176.

115 Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase, 163.

41

(Fig. 9) Andreas Gursky, Kamiokande, 2007.

Kamioka Nucleon Decay Experiment water tank in Kamioka, Japan.

42

Space of the Unconscious

drifts in the corners of the hallway. The whole place smelled indistinctly of old papers and body odours.’116 The ‘dark corridors’ of this ‘lodge-cum-reliquary,’ he later recollects, were ‘stuffed sheep and musty fleeces and mould-covered documents and discoloured photographs,’ ‘its corners caked with unfulfilled dreams.’117 Years later, the Dolphin Hotel has become (or perhaps, always was) part of the ‘ongoing circumstance’ of the narrator’s dreams. In these dreams, the hotel ‘is distorted, much too narrow,’ seeming like ‘a long, covered bridge. A bridge stretching endlessly through time.’ ‘All indications,’ the narrator says, are that he ‘belong[s] to this dream continuity.’118 Murakami’s postmodern sensibility, to quote Vidler, ‘sees the uncanny erupt in empty parking lots around abandoned or run-down shopping malls, in the screen trompe l’oeil of simulated space, in, that is, the wasted margins and surface appearances of postindustrial culture.’119 And so, upon returning to the Dolphin Hotel several years later, the narrator finds that it has been replaced by an equally unsettling ‘gleaming twenty-six storey Bauhaus Modern-Art Deco symphony of glass and steel’ and renamed l’Hôtel Dauphin. Similarly, the strange lobby of the hypermodern Hotel Okura (1Q84) is just as ‘uncanny:’ ‘with its high ceiling and muted lighting,’ the narrator remarks that it: seemed like a huge, stylish cave. Against the cave walls, like the sighing of a disembowelled animal, bounced the muted conversations of people seated on the lobby’s sofas. The floor’s thick, soft carpeting could have been primeval moss on a far northern island. It absorbed the sound of footsteps into its endless span of accumulated time.120

It is in the hotel that architectural domesticity and modernity collide, and so it should come as no surprise that it is here that the uncanny, etymologically linked to domestic, is manifest.

116 Ibid. 184.

117 Murakami, Dance Dance Dance, 3-4.

118 Ibid. 1. Despite the Dolphin Hotel

being rebuilt, a new receptionist tells the narrator (even though she is under the impression that she ought not to tell anyone) that she too found the secret dark floor of the hotel where the sheep professor lived: ‘I was alone in total darkness, and it was utterly quiet…I felt my way along the wall, very slowly.

And then, up ahead I could see a faint glow…The light was coming from a room with the door slightly ajar. The door was pretty strange too. I’d never seen an old door like that in the hotel before.’ (p.43) Later, the narrator finds himself in the same corridor. ‘Time and space,’ he observes, ‘must be getting out of whack.’ (p.77) 119 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 3.

120 Murakami, 1Q84, 530.

43

Space of the Unconscious

Dark (dream) realms

‘The darkness in the outside world has vanished, but the darkness in our hearts remains…that estrangement sometimes creates a deep contradiction or confusion within us.’121

In an interview, Murakami reflects that, although married, ‘sometimes I wonder what would it be like if I had been single . . . If and if and if. I could go along that passage and find new strange rooms.’122 For the author, the ‘dreamlike is very real,’ stating that ‘writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake…it’s not a fantasy.’123 It is the serious and detailed examination of the ‘strange new rooms’ of his dreams that occupies much of this fiction. The narrator of A Wind-up Bird Chronicle finds, for example, dreaming (although unaware of it at the time), finds himself in one such ‘room:’ The rectangular room was too long and wide to see from end to end, and arranged in it in perfectly straight lines were five hundred or more square tables. We sat at one of the tables in the middle, the only people there. Across the ceiling, as high as that of a Buddhist temple, stretched countless heavy beams, from all points of which there hung, like potted plants, objects that appeared to be toupees. A closer look showed me that they were human scalps. I could tell from the black blood on their undersides…Blood was dripping all around us like raindrops, the sound reverberating through the cavernous room. Only the scalps hanging above our table seemed to have dried enough for there to be no sign of blood dripping from them.124

The world of the familiar (the Buddhist temple) has been violently invaded by the unfamiliar (human scalps). This room bears a certain, if warped, similarity to a description of a wig factory by another character in the book, May Kashara. This place, she writes in a letter to the narrator, ‘is really weird:’ It’s huge, like a hangar, with a great, high roof, and wide open. A hundred-and-fifty girls sit lined up working there. It’s quite a sight. Of course, they didn’t have to put up such a monster factory.

It’s not as if we’re building submarines or anything. They could have divided us up into separate rooms.125

Despite the room of the narrator’s dreams being incomprehensibly big, he remains aware that he is the only one there. Similarly, in May’s factory, where ‘the bosses can oversee the whole bunch of us at once,’ the space has no dark corners. The paradigm of total control 121 Murakami, Kafka on the Shore, 243.

122 Matt Thompson, ‘Nobel prize winner in 123 Haruki Murakami in Interview,

waiting?’ in The Guardian, Saturday 26 May 2001. http://www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/index. cfm?author_number=1103 (accessed 03/11/13) 124 Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, 534.

125 Ibid. 447.

44

Space of the Unconscious

was dependent on universal transparency, which, Vidler writes, was instituted in order to ‘eradicate the domain of the myth, suspicion, tyranny, and above all, the irrational.’126 This panoptic desire, he proposes, came about as a result of the post-enlightenment phobia of dark spaces. From Jeremy Bentham to Le Corbusier, universal transparency is a definitive quality of modern architecture. The desire for a completely transparent self is represented by the architectural desire for universal ‘transparency of building materials, spatial penetration, and the ubiquitous flow of air, light and physical movement.’127 These dream spaces are either extremely light or dark, with the movement between the two typically representing the transition between two binary worlds of the mind. In Jungian psychology, the shadow, or ‘shadow aspect,’ refers to the unconscious mind.

‘Everyone carries a shadow,’ Carl Jung wrote, ‘and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.’128 The conflicts existing in his protagonists’ personal consciousnesses are first simulated and then projected in to the dark regions of their Jungian unconscious. Through his uncanny representations of overlit or darkened spaces of postmodernity, Murakami textualises with equal seriousness their impact on not only our conscious mind, but also that on our unconscious, other, mind.

126 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 168.

127 Ibid. 216.

128 Carl Gustav Jung, Psychology and Religion:

45

West and East (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938), 93.

CONCLUSIONS

I have never been to Japan, and at the outset of writing this dissertation, I was concerned that this might limit the purchase of my study. Unquestionably, Murakami’s literary outlook is global, in that he extensively references and is clearly influenced by postmodern films, literature and international pop-culture in general. Furthermore, his fiction does not shy away from the representation of the image-saturated, chaotic and claustrophobic spaces of contemporary international society. From endless ‘corridic abysses’ and simulated ‘degraded’ landscapes to the menacing expanses of the unconscious mind, Murakami conceptualises and constructs a peculiarly universal spatial reality. However his texts remain, like all cultural production, local, fragmentary and subjective. The real Japan, I have been assured, appears more ‘unreal’ than might be expected. Consequently I may well have misunderstood the novels’ Japanese context.

Nevertheless it has become clear that any attempt to present a totalising theory of a postmodern condition, or for that matter, Japanese architecture, would be questionable (even if I had visited the country). This dissertation has not sought to propose a singular conception of Murakamian architectural space, but rather to view it as the sight on which to practice a curious, informed and inter-disciplinary analysis. In a Deleuzian manner, theory has acted like a ‘box of tools:’ informed by diverse and divergent texts, I have attempted to ‘territorialise’ Murakami’s written architecture. Three fields were assigned; the first is of alienation, engaged particularly with Murakami’s corridors and illegible cities; the second is of the simulacrum, or the role of images and simulations in architectural space; and the last, the darkest, is of the disorientating projections of the characters’ unconscious minds. The boundaries of these territories, however, are prone to fluctuate: each has been significant here only as an ‘instrument for multiplication [that] also multiplies itself.’129 ‘Building a series of buildings in prose,’ Robert Harbison suggests in Eccentric Spaces (1977), ‘breaks down our belief in objective and subjective as distinct categories.’

129 Michel

Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), 208.

47

‘There is no limit,’ he writes ‘to what the mind can impose on the world once it has summoned the courage to do it, held back now only by the fear of seeing its thoughts too clearly.’130 Murakami’s fiction is preoccupied by the image, or more accurately, with its displacement, transformation, and neutral interstices. His rendering of the characters’ built environments is, therefore, able to address the complex entanglement of architecture and its representative image. ‘It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel,’ wrote J. G. Ballard, ‘the fiction is already here. The writer’s task is to invent reality.’131 His slippery architectural space manifests the reality, however illogical or banalising, of the characters’ spatial condition, exacerbating their ‘vertigo;’ and indeed, it is such exacerbation that Susan Sontag proposed might be the only way to cure ‘spiritual nausea,’ however temporarily.132 The architecture of Murakami’s fiction goes some way to unfold received architectural sensibilities to ‘new, yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions.’133 ‘So Perhaps,’ Fredric Jameson suggests, postmodern architecture ought to be ‘the property of literary critics after all, and textual in more ways than one.’134 Murakami’s architecture engages the visceral, unconscious and sometimes alarming aspects of situated experience. The interrogation of this space, this dissertation has proposed, expands not only the practice of literary architecture, but also the critical understanding of our own postmodern spatial reality.

130 Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces (London: André Deutsch, 131 J. G. Ballard, ‘Introduction’ in Crash, 4.

132 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 69 133 Jameson, Postmodernism, 39.

134 Ibid. 99.

49

1977), 77.

The warehouses for the online retailer Amazon are vast, surveilled and, and some argue, the future of work- and retail-space. In the UK they are typically located near motorway junctions and areas of high un-employment. The largest is in Dunfermline, which is the same size of fourteen football pitches, and a quarter of a mile end-to-end. The stock is housed here by a ‘chaotic storage’ system, meaning that the items are shelved in a random order, towards which a hand-held computer then directs human ‘pickers.’ ‘A typical shelf,’ writes Carole Cadwalladr in The Observer (December 1, 2013), ‘might have a set of razor blades, a packet of condoms and a My Little Pony DVD.’ These huge distribution centres filled with endless metal shelves have, I believe, some of the qualities of Murakami’s architecture. Endless scale, images of consumerist abundance and panoptic, technology controlled surveillance proliferate and have significantly shaped architectural space.

(Fig. 10) Amazon Warehouse, opposite.

50

51

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55

LIST OF FIGURES

Noé, Gaspar (dir.) Enter the Void (still), 2009. http://

(Fig. 1)

drnorth.wordpress.com/ Struth, Thomas. Shinju-ku (TDK), Tokyo 1986, 1986.

(Fig. 2)

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/ Robertson, Paul. The Royal National, 2009. http://

(Fig. 3)

www.flickr.com/photos/pauliewoll/3580244705/ Underground flooding reservoir in Saitama, Tokyo.

(Fig. 4)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/eerkmans/2475946192/ Gursky, Andreas, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1995.

(Fig. 5)

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/ Frontispeice, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of

(Fig. 6)

the World. London: Vintage: 2003.

The Electric City Pachinko Parlour in Akihabara,

(Fig. 7)

Tokyo. http://en.wikipedia.org/ Schaulager Laurenz Foundation, Basel/

(Fig. 8)

Münchenstein, 2003. http://en.wikipedia.org/ Gursky, Andreas, Kamiokande, 2007. http://

(Fig. 9)

publicdelivery.org/wp-content/ Amazon Warehouse, http://i.imgur.com/dJbz5Wj.jpg.

57

(Fig. 10)